


Make of the fragments trophies to liberty

by gloss



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Age Difference, F/M, Porn with Feelings, Porn with Politics, Service Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-29 02:17:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6354760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe escorts Leia to an Alderaanian function. He'd follow her <b>anywhere</b>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Make of the fragments trophies to liberty

**Author's Note:**

> So many thanks to Marcia, who both suggested some of the set-up and beta'd the resulting weirdness.

"You're early," Leia calls from the refresher.

Poe slips inside the room, pulling closed the door behind him. "Looks like I'm right on time."

She's standing in the center of the refresher cylinder, wet hair swirling down her naked back. She lifts one arm, then the other, to rinse.

"I have to get ready," she tells him over her shoulder.

With one hand on the edge of the 'fresher wall, he sways a little inside. "You look perfect like this."

Frowning, she just shakes her head. "Sweet."

"What?" he asks, pulling off one boot, then the other, dropping his trousers and kicking them behind him as he steps out of them. He pulls his dress shirt off over his head and drops it behind him, too, as he moves inside to join her.

"I'm almost done," she tells him.

"And I'm helping you finish," he replies, taking the cloth from her hands and running it down her back.

"You're distracting me, actually." She perches on the small curved bench and leans over to rinse the soap off her shins and feet.

He drops to his knees in front of her, hands on her thighs. She gazes down at him, one hand on his cheek.

"You'll get wet," she murmurs eventually.

"So I'll dry off," he says, moving his hands up her legs, along her hips and waist, and finally around to cup the weight of her breasts. She kisses him, her breasts filling his hands as his mouth opens for her. He strokes her nipples until she leans back, head falling back, legs falling open.

His hands drop to her legs again and he pulls himself forward, to kiss her mound, the soft skin of her inner thighs, the tangle of hair. He parts her lips with his tongue, hears her gasp over the water, and works her more open, warmer and wetter, until she's undulating into him, one hand on her own breast, the other in his hair.

The water soaks the back of his head and shoulders as he kneels there, arms around her hips, face buried between her legs. She arches above him, moaning every so often, tightening fingers on his neck and in his hair. Her toes point and flex, dig against the smooth surface of the fresher.

He sucks her labia until they swell, then twists his tongue around her clit until she bucks.

"All right," she says eventually. "Let's stop there."

He looks up at her, water running down his forehead, her wetness smearing his mouth and chin. He licks his lips. "I want to make you come."

"I know. And I want you to." She combs some hair back from his forehead. "You will, I promise."

Her schedule is paramount.

He dries off and dresses again, then waits in her dressing room while she dresses, far more slowly and carefully. 

"There was a handmaiden -- one of my mother's, I think, an old friend, who swore that to look your best at any event, you should be in the flush of arousal." She shakes her head. "I was so _shocked_ when I first heard that."

Her gown is diaphanous, and complicated, something wrapped around her waist and breasts, but open, floating, almost mesmerizing. Her hair, dry again, is pinned up in loops and braids that remind him of nothing so much as the engineering diagrams in flight school, fuselage cross-sections and bundles of avionics.

"Traditional Alderaanian costume," she says, bowing her head so he can fasten a necklace around her neck. She glances up from beneath thick, dark lashes. "Of course, it's been so long. I suppose anything gets to count as traditional now."

He can't reply to that; the truth is as sharp as the knife-sharp metal of her necklace and just as inarguable. All he can do is adjust the clasp on the nape of her neck.

"There," he says, and she takes his arm. She looks magnificent, and regal, and he would say so, but she would laugh at him.

She pauses in the foyer before the mirror while the droid fetches his greatcoat and her cape. "Make a pretty couple," she says.

He nods.

"Dashing young man kindly escorting granny to the ball," she finishes. 

He tilts his head. "Untrue."

"Agree to disagree," she tells him over her shoulder, swirling the cape around her.

"If granny looked like you," he wants to say, "I'd have trouble keeping my hands off her, too."

He doesn't say that, though. He watches her with heat in his eyes, down his chest, and rolls his lips together to remember the taste of her.

\- 

He is too important, somehow, to be allowed to fly them to their destination. An escort remains at her side at all times.

Before they come out of hyperspace, she sets aside her work and pulls him close, holding both his hands in her own.

"I need to ask something of you," she begins.

"Anything --" he starts to say, but she knew he'd say that, so she's still talking.

"Tonight. Would you, for me --. Try not to get quite so --" She purses her lips and shakes her head. "I can't believe _I'm_ going to say this. Bear with me. Try not to get so impassioned, all right?"

"About what?"

"Politics," she says. "The Republic, but especially the First Order."

"Do I usually?" He actually isn't sure. He knows, of course, what he believes, what he's fighting for, but he'd never have seen himself as much of a debater, let alone a raving ideologue.

She squeezes his neck. "Context matters. Where we're coming from, no, you've never struck me as all that overly fervent. But these are relics. Royalists living in the past, apotheosizing an Alderaan that never was. All they do is scheme and argue with each other, enact petty revenges and meaningless cruelty."

He scowls a little, wrinkles his nose, and she chuckles.

"Indeed. But they're also very generous benefactors. And, call me craven, but I'd rather take their credits and spend it on your starfighters than see it go to yet another eugenics campaign in the guise of 'Pure Alderaan'."

"When you put it like that..." He salutes her smartly and she, as expected, laughs at him. The sound is low and throaty, genuine, and he cannot help grinning back.

-

She keeps their relationship well-contained. She is, above all, a politician. She'll never lose track of her heart, not again. 

She still _has_ her heart, of course; love, like dignity and authority, will always radiate from her. But her heart now is far more orderly. You hear stories about what she was like in her youth, with Solo and Skywalker at her side, in the flush of the rebellion's victories. She was wild then, brilliant and powerful. Impulsive and beautiful. 

She is more cautious now. All her daring and risk, she pours into the resistance, into tactics that surprise and unsettle and strategies that terrify. But when it comes to herself, caution above all obtains.

He's hardly young, and yet. If he lives to her age, he may very well acquire a similar sort of tempering, find himself quieter, less brash, much more careful with his words and feelings.

He does not, however, expect to live nearly that long.

-

The building that was the Alderaanian consulate in Galactic City is old enough that its original entrance is several levels below what is now considered habitable. The current entrance is a holo-projection of what it used to look like: magnificent pale stone bent in graceful curves as if by the wind. From the air, it looks beautiful.

Once in front of it, however, the holo winks and gutters. It's all too easy to see the plain, heavily-fortified entrance behind the projection.

As soon as they step off the airspeeder, Leia is swept inside while a hulking, old-model security droid bars his way.

She backtracks to join him.

"Captain Solo?" the droid asks. It's a droid, so its tone does not change, but somehow it manages to sound doubtful.

"Not hardly." He leans in for the retinal scan. 

"Dameron, Poe," it says after a moment. "Former rank, Commander, New Republic Starfleet. Dishonorable discharge."

She squeezes his hand.

"That's right," he tells the droid. There's something about hearing the facts so plainly - he is not Solo, he is dishonorable - that's at once amusing and a little heartbreaking. 

He goes with "amusing" for the time being.

-

BB-8, quickly, then C-3PO, at excruciating length, briefed him on the significance of this occasion. Alderaan's traditional Third Moon Festival marks the passage of the much smaller, far more distant third moon across the skies when it managed to transit both of the two major moons. Its orbit was highly irregular, occasionally retrograde, affected as it was by all the other moons as well as the star and Alderaan itself. This is a day for celebration, rejuvenation, and looking forward. 

He does not have too many idiosyncratic details of etiquette to remember, luckily. He must, simply, remain at the general's side, enjoy the food, dance.

He hasn't practiced the dancing, assuming that he's good enough on his feet to pass muster. Besides, on Alderaan, the elder of a pair leads the dance, whatever their gender. 

"I'm in your hands," he says under his breath when the wind ensemble starts up and she rises, inviting him to dance.

"I would apologize for that," she replies, "but I'd be lying." 

She's smiling, lifting his hand and turning him around in a circle, then back around widdershins. Her touch is light as air, just her fingertips, yet she can twist him this way, then bend back, then pause.

"Very nice," she says and the flush spills rapidly all across his body.

He keeps his gaze on her; the crowd blurs at the edge of his vision into bright patches of melting colour. 

-

The old guard bow to Leia, refuse to meet her eyes, do everything but kiss her feet. He's more than discomfited by this; it's almost repulsive, in a way that he hadn't foreseen.

He would do anything for her, because of who _she_ is.

They would genuflect to her, prostrate and abase themselves, because of _what_ they say she is, what she represents. 

It's just a few crawling steps from there to the Order's deadly authoritarian fetish. The Order has simply enlarged and generalized this existing tendency toward reverence and identification of self with the innately, supremely powerful.

He gulps down another cup of punch. It tastes like flowers, crushed in your nails or teeth. He remembers, suddenly and _fiercely_ , playing with another kid, some Yavin spring, picking armfuls of Massassian heartsbloods, breaking the calyx with their thumbnails and sucking out the nectaries.

"You're a much better escort than previous ones," an older Alderaanian tells him, coming in very close. "Though still scandalously young, of course."

"Hmm?" Poe asks, still caught a little in the memory. When _was_ that? It must have been before his mom died.

"Better than the others she has inflicted on us over the years," the gentleman says, rolling his eyes as if the very mention of them is too absurd to bear. "Pirates and terrorists, to a man."

He is taller than Poe, with a full head of silver hair rippling off his long, handsome face. His skin, exposed by the flowing Alderaanian tunic past his ribcage, is taut, darkly tanned.

"Ah, well, I wouldn't know about that." Poe tries to edge away.

When he smiles, his teeth are large and white, so regular that they can't be fully natural. "It is her prerogative, of course, to bring any escort she wishes. We always welcome our princess with open arms. But it has been...difficult. At times."

"Is that so?" Poe says.

"Between you and me," he continues, leaning in conspiratorially, taking Poe's elbow, "I think she does it deliberately."

Of course it's not just between them. He wants this to get back to Leia, for whatever obscure reason. He's still clasping Poe tightly, hand moving around to his back, brushing his ass now.

"Interesting, very interesting." This just became too much fun to disengage from, not just yet. "Tell me. Who was your least favourite?"

"Solo," he replies promptly.

"Of course." Poe nods knowingly. "Such a rascal."

"Drunkard and gold-digger," the man says. He clears his throat noisily, then leans past Poe and _spits_ behind him. "Sub-sentient Corellian trash."

All right, this isn't fun any longer. It probably wasn't fun to begin with, but the punch is strong and the guy's groping hand difficult to elude.

Poe drains another cup of punch, then raises it to his companion. "He's one of my heroes, actually."

It's not the best exit line (again, _punch_ ), but it's enough to make the man gape a little and release his hold on Poe's ass.

"Really?" she asks him a little later when they're dancing again and he's catching her up. She manages to instill both irony and doubt in so few syllables. "He's a hero of yours?"

"Sort of. It's complicated."

Her brows lift but she doesn't say anything beyond, "Indeed."

"This is exhausting," he confesses as the music twinkles down, slowing and fading. "I don't know how you do it."

"What, gladhand and lie through my teeth at every turn?"

"Sure, that."

She squeezes his hand and manages to keep talking to him as they make their way off the dance floor, even as she accepts bows and curtsies and greets old friends.

"It's something anyone can be trained to do," she tells him. "As necessary as I know it is, it can still make me feel filthy."

If they were alone, he would kiss the wrinkle between her eyebrows until it smoothed away. 

He tells her that, right against her ear, and she smiles up at him. "That might take a long while."

"Good."

-

Perhaps it is the punch, or the attendees are as naturally fractious as Leia had suggested, but after the fruit ices are served and the plates are cleared, the mood begins to grow ugly.

A troupe of miserable-looking third-generation Alderaanian exiles tramps and bangs its way through a moon dance. At the head of the crowd, Leia leads the applause, then turns to address everyone.

He has heard the essence of this speech many times: culture is a living thing, like freedom, and must be allowed to flourish. We must take up the fragments of what was and make them the seeds of a new, greater freedom. Our loved ones' blood cannot be in vain, now or any other time. _Especially_ now. We have a chance to make decisive changes for the future, if we work together.

Someone hisses. After a moment, a few more take it up.

Poe starts to move forward, but Leia touches his hand and asks him, with a shift of glance and incline of head, to pull back.

"You care nothing for what Alderaan meant!" someone says, slurring, probably more loudly than he'd meant.

Leia's smile tightens down to a lethal line.

"Where were you when we lost everything?" another shouts.

As if dying in place were the only authenticity possible. Where, Poe wonders, were they? Everyone here, by definition, was off-planet. At least she was fighting; most of these people look far too smug and comfortable to have been doing anything besides fattening their credit accounts.

"I was, as everyone knows, being held by Tarkin," Leia says. Her tone is flat.

"You didn't even _try_ to save us --"

"Now wait a minute!" Poe says before he can stop himself.

She cuts him silent with a look. Her face has gone paler than her gown, than the glittering lights all around them. Her eyes are huge, and dark, like bruises.

The same heckler, a florid person in blue caftan and blue muttonchops, steps forward, growing bolder. "Now, decades on, you still demand our loyalty? Our hard-earned credits for your terrorist campaigns? While parading yet another gigolo before us?"

Poe's face heats at that. He lifts his chin and recites to himself the sequence of steps in a safety check for each model of X-Wing, beginning with the T-65B.

It doesn't calm him down, but it does keep him quiet.

"Just how long must we endure these insults and provocations?"

That shout comes, not from Poe's friend with the roving hands yelling, but a small woman, draped in gauzy metallic fabric, sometimes blue, sometimes steel. She can barely hold herself upright under all the jewelry and complex braids, but her voice can certainly carry.

"You have a son! Send him to these occasions. A callow halfbreed would be _far_ preferable to, to --"

She doesn't finish before the security droids are hustling out of the banquet hall.

Leia holds herself absolutely still. Poe is right next to her, but the tension in her posture means he might as well be a parsec distant. She is tiny, immobile as rock, _furious_.

"Is anyone else interested in sharing their opinions of my private life?" she asks. Her voice is low, but she knows how to make herself heard. "I'm one of the few democrats here, so believe me when I say that I'd love to hear it."

The crowd shifts, uneasy mutters rising from several distinct groups. 

A very tall woman with silver-blonde hair turns to face the rest of the crowd. "Her majesty asked you brutes a question."

"Thank you, Evaan," Leia says curtly. "Anyone?"

She gives them longer than Poe would have, were he in her position (as if he ever would be, or would know the first thing to do). Finally, when even he is starting to rock back on his heels and fidget a little, she motions to the musicians to resume playing.

When she grasps his hand, he takes a short step back, expecting to dance again. But she's moving away, through the crowd, her chin up and shoulders perfectly straight.

"Good night, then," she tells the crowd. "And a most rapturous Third Moon to you all."

He follows her, careful not to catch up and thus break protocol, yet desperate all the same to sweep her up, carry her away.

Another sec-droid tries to bar their way out of the hall. Leia stops short and _stares_ at it until something, some ancient subroutine, must kick in and it folds up against the wall.

"I'm legitimately terrible at this," she says, leading him by the hand through a darkened passage.

"Hardly," he says. 

"My mother would have my head, and rightfully so." She pushes open a small door, so low that he has to duck his head to get through. 

They stand on a narrow balcony, barely wide enough for them side by side.

The lights, sour smog, muffled, violent noise of the city assault them. As if all this clamor had been waiting for them, and now it is determined to roar, to make itself known and impossible to ignore, every bit as much as any drunken, emboldened Alderaanian. 

She leans against the railing, drawing him in, hands on his waist, her head tilted back a little so she can meet his eyes. The city lights catch her hair in a halo; the clouds darken her eyes.

"You're better at it than anyone else," he tries, but she shakes her head. The filmy material of her dress catches on his fingers, lifting in a breeze, and soon enough, she's wrapping her arms around his neck, lifting herself up and back, kissing him as gently as she might in the early morning.

"You hate this even more than I do," she reminds him, mouth on his jaw, hands tight on his neck.

He remains still, just long enough to assess the situation: while they are in a relatively public place, she has moved to intimacy, so, he concludes, it is acceptable to return her attention.

"Which part?" he asks, turning his head a little, kissing her, tangling his hand in her braids.

"Royalty," she says eventually. Her lids are heavy. "Aristocracy. Obsequiousness."

"I do," he admits, "but. Better you than anyone else."

"Better to smash it all to bits," she says hoarsely, nipping down on his lower lip, her breath starting to come rougher, faster. He rolls his hips when she bites again, harder, and pulls her up to her toes. 

"All of it?" he asks, kissing her jaw, sucking a bruise where he shouldn't, her nails in his scalp and her damp skin adhering to his. He grins to think of it, all those memories of edu-holos in school, Death Stars blooming pink and white. If everything were that easy, life would be much, much sweeter.

She wriggles a little, shifting her balance, wrapping one leg loosely around his calves. He's bearing most of their weight now, and their hips move together until she's panting, face in his neck. He manages to work one hand between her legs.

She looks at him then as he touches her, her eyes bright and depthless, _ageless_. She holds her breath, biting her lip, as he parts her outer lips. She's so wet that his mind reels, his breath catches. Hours of arousal, he can tell, from the sticky remnants down the inside of her thighs, halfway to her knees, to the fresh, near-liquid slicking his palm now.

He groans, unable to stay quiet or still, but apparently that's allowed, too, tonight. She kisses him again, deep and eager, grinding against his palm and taking one, then two, and then a third finger up inside. He curls his thumb around her clit, and wishes desperately it were his tongue. He's probably crushing her against the railing, but she's squeezing him back, biting at his lips, shaking in his arms as she comes on his hand, and keeps coming, small cries shattering their kiss. He stumbles backward, half-dragging her, and slides down the wall until she's in his lap and they're fighting to open his trousers. He doesn't want to pull out, even to replace fingers with cock, but then she leans back and pulls herself up, off him. She hovers there, hands on his shoulders, gazing down at him.

He thinks wildly of nebulae, glowing from the inside, commanding the dark, the faces of ancient goddesses from faiths no one alive can remember.

He holds her by the hips, one leg flung out, foot caught in the railing's grillwork, the other knee bent. Her dress is open, shoved up and pulled back. When she pushes herself down onto his cock, his back arches and he flails one hand out blindly, grasping some piece of pottery or architectural flourish and holding on. She sinks on him, forever, her smile curving above him, taking everything he has. He thrusts up, and up, as she leans over and kisses him deep enough to choke out all his breath.

"Told you," she says, hoarse and exultant, riding him hard. She thrusts back against him, her hands skating over his throat. "I do keep my word."

She could mean any number of things, but he nods furiously, agreeing. He arches again, words melting in the heat in his throat, and again, drawn upward, clinging to her.

Anyone could see them here; the air-taxis and personal speeders zip by at every angle. He should shield her face, cover her somehow, but instead, the thought makes him groan and thrust harder, lifting his face to the clouds. His mouth finds one of her nipples and she moans, wrapping both her arms around his head and holding him there until he has to struggle to breathe.

When she comes again, leaning back, face and throat and breasts exposed to the skies, she hangs so brightly he has to squint to see. Her clutch and suck around him pulls out the last of his patience. His orgasm rocks up his spine, down his legs, makes him babble devotion and beg for more as everything sharpens, goes brighter, harder, blades shining against blades, cutting shards.

She is terrifying, awe-inspiring, and he's more ardent, far more zealous, than anyone.

-

"Home," she says, much later, as their shuttle quakes through hyperspace.

He would prefer, as ever, to be flying. Being a passenger is equal parts boring and nervewracking. But she has curled up against him, cheek against his chest. He'd thought she was asleep, she has been quiet so long.

"Almost," he replies, and pulls his greatcoat up over her lap, up to her shoulder.

Unpinned, her braids fall loose down her back. He lifts them, toys with them, and when she says, "no, already there," tugs on them.

Anyone can be trained to lie, and lie for so many reasons, and lie so well they forget they're doing it.

**Author's Note:**

> Title and most elements of Leia's speech come from [Report on the Principles of Political Morality](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Principles_of_Political_Morality) (1794); further material from [War & Revolution](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/14.htm) (1917).


End file.
